eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

March 2011

03/27/2011

Helen is a movie about depression that intends to speak to multiple audiences. The two lead characters suffer from different varieties of depression, making it clear that it is an illness that can be inherited or caused by life events. It can happen to people with sad lives but it can also happen to people with good lives. It can come and go away. It can stay forever. It can be cured or contained or controlled. It can wreck families and it can cement friendships. It can sometimes be overcome and it can sometimes overcome.

Helen’s husband asks Helen at one point in the movie why her friend Matilda can help her but not him. “What makes her so special?” he inquires. “She doesn’t ask me how I feel,” Helen says, “She knows.”

And I think that is what this movie aims to do. It aims to give the viewer an understanding of something that is deeper and more profound than what we might call “being sad.” “Your wife is not sad,” says one of the doctors, “She is ill.”

If sadness is a scratch, depression is a wound. Sadness affects us at our surface. Depression invades the soul at a deeper level. It is not like tripping and skinning our knee. It can be more like falling off a cliff. One of the features that makes this movie so important is the way it describes the ripple effects of depression on the families and friends of those who must live with the depressed person. Indeed, perhaps the greatest danger of Depression is the way that it serves to alienate us from the relationships that keep normal people from getting sad.

In the end, people need to have other believe in them and keep a home open for them to come to. In the end, not having that is what makes people end it all.

Question for Comment: Who doesn’t have to ask you how you feel to know how you feel? Why is that?

Everyonce in a while, someone comes into your life that has a gravitational pull capable of disrupting the orbit of your daily habits. In As it is in Heaven this role is played by a conductor who has returned to his boyhood village in Sweden to die. He winds up taking on the job of choir director at a local church and immediately, lives begin to change, for the better and for worse. The fact is that in a small town like this, everyone has learned to compensate and cope with each other's disfunctional ways to the point where everything works because nothing really actually works. The community thrives on its coping mechanisms rather than in healthy ways. So when someone healthy comes to the village and begins to bring people back into harmony with themselves and each other, those who have been surviving (or thriving) by being left undisturbed in their flawed lives begin to resent the newcomer and his influence.

Bullied people begin to stand up to bullies. Abused wives begin to demand respect. The town's "outcasts" begin to assert their will to belong. And those who cast them out are exposed for their hypocracies. Oddly enough, the storyline of As it is in Heaven is nothing more than the story of the gospels in a way. It is the story of one man putting people back into harmony with themselves, and thus out of harmony with a dysfuntional society, and yet how health begins to force the unhealthy to realign themselves with truth (or resist it). It is a story about the persecution of truth by the guardians of truth.

And at the end ... a scene in which a certain millenial harmony emerges from the sacrifice of a dying messianic figure who has worked his miracle by rejecting formulaic moralities and by valuing the outcasts of his village.

Question for comment: Have you ever become a healthier person at the expense of social disruption in the primary relationships of your life?